Related Stories

Australia's Aborigines, long considered a nomadic people, appear to have farmed eels and built stone dwellings in the southeast of the country for 8,000 years, according to an archaeologist.

The claims, centred on the Gunditjmara people around Lake Condah - about 350 km west of what is today Melbourne - are made by archaeologist Dr Heather Builth and will be aired tonight on ABC TV's science program Catalyst.

In the first evidence of a sedentary Aboriginal community, Builth found what she argues is an ancient eel farm in the form of countless channels crisscrossing the landscape at Lake Condah.

"This had to be excavated," said Builth, an honorary research associate with Monash University in Melbourne who is also helping produce a management plan for the nearby Winda-Mara Aboriginal Corporation near Lake Condah.

Although the land was drained in the late 19th century when European settlers moved in, Builth measured up every hill and valley in the landscape and used a geography simulation program to 're-flood' the land on computer. She found an artificial system of ponds connected by canals, covering more than 75 square km.

"The community excavated channels to get direct access to baby eels that were migrating from the sea, and to bring them into prepared wetlands," Builth told ABC Science Online. "It was a gigantic aquaculture system."

Builth also found evidence of stone huts scattered across the landscape. She found many stones lay in circular patterns, and were so uniform they could only have been stacked there by humans.

Although she can not accurately date the huts, there are historical accounts back to 1841 which she has relied on, along with deductions based on what materials would have been available, to postulate the construction of the huts. She said the stone foundations would have had wooden boughs on top, covered with peat sods for strength and reeds for waterproofing.

Secrets in the sediments

More evidence to support Builth's theory about the eel farming and processing was found in the sediments underneath trees and in the remaining swamps near Lake Condah.

Most recently, Professor Peter Kershaw, a Monash University palynologist - or expert in ancient pollen - studied the pollen record in the sediments of swamps identified by Builth as being eel-farming areas. He found evidence of a sudden change in vegetation consistent with an artificial ponding system, and initial radiocarbon dating of the soil samples suggest the ponds were created up to 8,000 years ago.

In addition, Dr Barry Sankhauser of the Australian National University in Canberra used mass spectrometry and gas chromatography, to find evidence of eel lipids in the sediments beneath hollowed-out trees which Builth says were likely to have been used as smokehouses and family cooking hearths.

"Guditjmara weren't just catching eels; their whole society was based around eels. And that to me was the proof," said Builth, who argues the community was smoking eels to preserve and trade them.

Ken Saunders, a member of the Guditjmara community, was not surprised at the find. "We used to trap eels ourselves and use the eels traps. And some of the young fellas today still use the eel traps. So the eel traps were apart of our diet. I still eat the bloody things today," he told Catalyst.

Gunditjmara eel-trap-weaving skills are still being handed down today. "We weren't nomads. We didn't wander all over the blood place and gone walkabout. We had an existence here," said Saunders, a member of the Lake Condah Sustainable Development Project, which is seeking National Heritage listing for the area so they can rebuild and recreate the fish traps as the basis of a sustainable economic base for the region.

"Well you couldn't have a blackfella telling that story. So to prove it we had to have a white person doing the scientific research to say this is real," he added.

Builth first investigated the theory that the Gunditjamara were sedentary in her doctorate between 1997 and 2002, and has since published a number of scientific papers and presented her work at archaeological conferences.